Don’t Tear Down Leaburg Dam-Fix It!

In 2022, EWEB voted to decommission the historic Leaburg Dam and Power Plant on the McKenzie River—one of the few local, renewable sources we currently have. Now we are being asked to accept a plan to demolish a functioning green-energy infrastructure and spend an estimated $225 million doing it—without considering impacts to the local economy, ecology, a replacement bridge, or the drop in nearby property values.

Let’s be blunt: destroying Leaburg Dam is not “progress.” It is waste.

When Leaburg operated, it produced enough electricity for roughly 13,000 homes. Eliminating that dependable local generation makes our region more vulnerable when wildfires or ice storms damage BPA transmission lines. Resilience is not a slogan; it is a necessity, and local hydropower strengthens the grid when larger systems fail.

Leaburg Dam is also a comparatively low-impact facility with two fish ladders. It diverts water to the fish hatchery, critical as salmon runs face mounting stress, including warming ocean temperatures. Since the power plant went offline, irrigation challenges have hit farmers and homeowners who rely on water from the Leaburg Canal. These are real, on-the-ground consequences, not abstract talking points.

Repair and upgrade alternatives deserve serious, transparent analysis. If EWEB can justify spending hundreds of millions to destroy this asset, it can justify investing in modernizing it.

And this is not a done deal. Decommissioning still requires approvals under FERC and NEPA, and an Environmental Impact Statement has not been completed. Public scrutiny matters now!

Tell regulators and EWEB: keep Leaburg Dam—repair it, upgrade it, and protect it.

To get involved, contact Oregon Citizens for Energy Security (OCES) at LeaburglakeactivitiesLLC@gmail.com or contact EWEB at LeaburgLakeinfo@EWEB.org.

Nadine Scott,

Leaburg

Make your thoughts known

The National Forest is in your backyard, but many of the decisions on what happens on that land are made in Washington D.C. and in Portland offices.

The Forest Service’s budget for FY2027 (which starts October 1st) is requested by people who are appointed by the President’s administration, because they are at the GS-15 level and above. Forest Service employees in the McKenzie River Ranger District and Willamette Forest office have very little input into how the agency is funded. They are always told “do more with less”.

The political appointees in USDA -FS have requested major reductions in the 2027 budget for the Forest Service. The reductions will severely limit what the local Forest Service employees can do – if they even have jobs. Also it includes zero funding for Forest Research and for State and Private forestry.

Two other major changes are being planned that will affect our forest: 1 – major reorganization of the Regional and Washington DC staff levels, and 2 – the plan to combine the Forest Service wildland firefighting with the US Wildland Fire Service, which is part of the Department of Interior. A six-month study of this is being conducted now, but the 2027 budget request assumes it will happen. Organizational structure is critical to successful, safe wildfire response, and it cannot be changed in just a few months.

If this sounds chaotic – its because it is. It’s a lot of change in a very short time. The changes are not well thought out, planned for, or documented. Although the National Forest budget is relatively small (it was $3 billion last year without wildland fire), it is extremely important in our lives. Please make your thought known to your US Senators and Representatives.

Background reading is avail-able at NAFSR.org (National Association of Forest Service Retirees), and many other web sites. And you can always talk with your FS neighbors about it too.

Margaret Beilharz

Rainbow